Effective?

Yesterday we worshiped with the congregation of the Ondas de Paz UMC in Cabudare, Venezuela. This congregation was started by our good friends, and now family members, Efrain and Bethsaida Morales.  For several years it met in their modest home in Cabudare.  When they moved to the US to be with their children Pastor Efrain appointed Alexander and Amaryllis to be the new pastors.  This young couple had very little experience and almost no seminary or theological training.

However, Pastor Morales knew they were people of great faith and good character and would grow into the office.  And how they have grown!  That has been a sheer joy to observe. As they have grown the church has also grown.  First they knocked out the interior walls of the Morales' old house.  They added Sunday School rooms in the back.  But the last time I worshiped there, in March of this year, the sanctuary was full and people were standing outside the doors and windows sharing as best they could in the dynamic service.

Yesterday we gathered in a large "Party Room" as a great crowd gathered for worship. The rented facility is on a main street, has off-street parking (rare in this area) and is sheltered by several very large trees, making it extremely pleasant in the tropical heat. This was great to see after being used to the overwhelmingly cramped facilities of the last 10 years.

Is the description above what is necessary before a church can be called an effective congregation: new people, new/expanded facilities, more money, more attendance?  Well, maybe.  These are not typical of ineffective churches.

However one factor I did not mention in my description of the church is the issue of transformed lives.  Lives are being changed in this congregation.  Just yesterday several adults were converted and made a profession of faith. Homes are being restored.  Lives are being changed.

This is the measurement of effectiveness:  Transformed lives.  Not attendance, not buildings, not new members, not apportionments paid, not number in the choir or Sunday School Attendance, not cell groups or home groups, not mission teams and mission budgets, or any of the other ways we typically measure effectiveness.

My denomination has been content to have no or few professions of faith, little growth, or actually slow decline, aging congregations and dwindling constituencies and impact as long as the one vital sign was healthy: 100% apportionments paid.Other denominations have majored on other single focus issues such as theological integrity or Sunday School attendance or Baptisms, etc. The result:  all mainline denominations in the US are in decline.

Effectiveness is measured by transformed lives, lives transformed, changed, redeemed by the power of the Gospel of Christ.  When a church is effective it will impact its worship attendance and mission offering, its percentage of apportionments paid, its Sunday School attendance, its numbers of baptisms, etc.  However those alone are not the signs of effectiveness.  Our church will be judged by the Great Judge on whether we were engaged with Him in redeeming lost humanity.

Ondas de Paz is doing just that.  Most churches in the US are not.  There is so much we could learn from the church in Latin America! However, that would require at least the following:

1. The honest recognition that what the church in America is doing is failing miserably.
2. The burning desire to reach people with the Gospel of Christ and see lives transformed, the lost found.
3. A teachable spirit - a loss of the arrogance of the American church.
4. Humility. The Latin American church has so little of what the American Church values, but so much of what we need.  Could the church in America change its core values enough to esteem what God is doing in Latin America?

Do you want to be effective?